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Future Generations and Contemporary Ethical Theory

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Future Generations and Contemporary Ethical Theory FUTURE GENERATIONS AND CONTEMPORARY ETHICAL THEORY STEPHEN BICKHAM Mansfield State College There exists today in philosophy a question of our ethical obligations to future generations. Several different aspects of this question render it philosophically unusual. For one thing the substantive answer to the question is not in dispute. Were someone to suggest seriously that we have no ethical obligations to future generations and mean by this that we need take no care for what living conditions on the planet will be in a hundred years - that whether there would exist then, say, a lethal level of radioactivity in the atmosphere, it would be no concern of ours - we should regard that individual as lacking one of the most basic of human ethical sensibilities. Of course we have some serious responsibility for the future, though this does not commit us to the more particular position that we have ethical obligations to future generations. The question does not, thus, require an answer at the general level, nor am I prepared here to demarcate specifically the content of our responsibility for the future, though I shall treat of others' attempts to do so. I am interested rather in why this question should seem so mysterious at this time as to generate a dispute or issue within the philosophical community. Thus my focus will be interior to philosophy. I hope to show how the assumptions involved in raising this question in this way make it difficult for us to address the new realities with which the question is concerned. Why is this question a current one in philosophy? From a somewhat sociological perspective it is significant that John Rawls in A Theory of Justice, perhaps the most influential ethical treatise of the seventies, is the first person who seems to have dealt with the question in its current form.' I shall examine Rawls' position in detail later, but basically he treats justice among generations as involving each generation's passing on to the next a suitable accumulation of intellectual, economic, and educational "capital" so that the next can have the werewithal to continue or to establish just institutions, as well as support a reasonable standard of living.2 While the immense philosophical popularity of A Theory of Justice J. Value Inquiry 15:169-177 (1981) 0022-5363/81/0152-0169 $01.35: 1981 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, The Hague. Printed in the Netherlands. 170 brought the current question to the attention of the philosophical community, most philosophers writing of the issue of ethical obligation to future generations since Rawls have seen the problem in an environmental rather than an economic context? It is clear that our relatively new capacity for possibly permanent devastation of the environment has created a new ethical situation which requires a reassessment of our responsibility to the future. Environmental pollution itself is nothing new. I am sitting a quarter of a mile from a river which has contained no life for about 80 years due to pollution from mine acid waste. In my county virtually every marketable tree was cut down between 1895 and 1915. But until now there just have not been enough people nor an advanced enough technology to threaten a large environment with permanent destruction or impairment. Trees grow back and mine acid waste pollution can be stopped, though it is expensive to do so. But we simply do not know how to render radioactive waste from power plants nonradioactive, or to replace the ozone layer in the atmosphere should this become depleted, or to develop an effective, economical replacement for iron. It is quite simple. We did not have the responsibility for the future that we do now before we had the capacity to destroy it. As I said earlier, our responsibility for the future in a broad sense is well recognized. What is not understood is how this responsibility is to be rationally grounded in an ethical theory. But it is becoming clear to ethicists that the question of our obligations to the future can be seen as a litmus test for an ethical theory. No theory can really be adequate to the contemporary situation which cannot found such obligations on its own principles. The problem is that each of the major, current ethical theories has difficulty doing this. I shall examine briefly the deontological theory and at more length the utilitarian and contractarian theories to illustrate why this is so. Several of the basic strengths and weaknesses of deontological ethics become involved in a discussion of the theory's applicability to the question of justice among generations. One of the strengths of Kant's position is that it insists that good is absolute and independent of time of circumstances. Since the basic statements of ethics are deduced from the very nature of the rational will, good is founded on impermeable and permanent bedrock. It can be seen, then, that the categorical imperative can be made to cover concern for future generations with no especial difficulty. Since we are to act so that the maxim behind our action would be appropriate as a basis for a universal law of morality, and since any law applies over time (i.e., is not limited to the present generation only), Kant's theory allows us to conclude at least that we have a duty of justice to future generations. On the other 171 hand, the theory seems to provide us with no specific content to this duty and, just as important, no method for settling rival claims between generations. Ross' formulation of the deontological position seems no stronger or weaker in this matter than Kant's. To say that we have a prima facie duty to future generations unless this contradicts a more basic prima facie duty, for instance to our own generation, gives us no way of deciding which is the actual duty and which only the prima facie. Nor is an appeal to intuition here any more helpful. Either it begs the question (which was, after all, how such an intuition is to be grounded) or it is useless (since it claims the intuition is ultimate). And, of course, it no more than Kant's position is of any assistance when different individuals, while recognizing the general law, claim differing intuitions as to what it entails. The deontological position, then, has no basic theoretical problem in considering justice among generations, but it is open to criticism here as elsewhere that it achieves universal applicability by a retreat into generality and intuition. This position is, after all, quite an old one and was developed when eternal verities as a basis for ethics seemed much more reasonable than they do now. While certain aspects of the deontological perspective make it seem somewhat promising as a model for dealing with intergenerational matters, it is unlikely that we shall be able to dispose of our problem, which is after all new wine, in a wineskin of so ancient vintage. Utilitarianism presents us with a different set of advantages and disadvantages in dealing with future generations. On the plus side, utilitarianism is structured around a method for adjudicating disputes, the utilitarian calculus, which would appear applicable no matter what new realities emerge in the future. But with regard to our issue, a severe and basic difficulty faces the utilitarian; in this case it is a matter of dispute just how much the well-being of future persons is to count in the utilitarian calculus, and thus an accurate calculation seems impossible. If, for instance, we calculate the probable number of all future persons and compare this with the number of current persons, the former outnumber the latter by a wide margin. Thus it seems that the current generation according to utilitarianism would always be "starved" in favor of its progeny? On the other hand, since future people do not now exist, it could be argued that their interests, strictly speaking, should not be included in the utilitarian calculation at all? Or it should be claimed that we have obligations to future generations that are proportional to our distance from them in time, with our owing least to the very remote, o Should this latter position be accepted we would need to estimate the size of each generation and factor this together with the generation's time distance from us into our calculations to determine our obligation to it - clearly a cumbersome and unworkable process. 172 Some utilitarians argue that what is to be maximized according to utilitarianism is not total utility, but average utility. Jere Paul Surber, writing on the future generations problem, states that this is the traditional position of utilitarianism, 7 which is, I think, mistaken. Surber defines average utility as, "Uav-- G/N," where N is the number of people and G the total good produced by an action. Surber goes on to argue that this formula provides no help to the utilitarian in the case of the problem of future generations, which is correct. The position of such a utilitarian is even worse than Surber allows, however. If Uav = G/N were to be taken strictly, one could always increase Uav by reducing N as well as by increasing G. It would seem that a utilitarian holding to such a formula would be obligated to advocate as small a population as possible in order to up the average. Let us suppose a universe of only two people who are listening to a recording of a symphony. Suddenly God decides to create another couple, and they appear miraculously in the room with the others. According to the formula, the value of Uav has not gone up by the creation of these new appreciators; it has decreased by a factor of two.
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